Bill Pullman may have been the only person in America this May who had not heard of Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina lawyer who’d been found guilty of killing his wife and son two months prior. 

“I guess I have a little filter that makes me not want to pay attention to every heinous murder that happens,” says Pullman with a shrug, explaining why he didn’t know about Murdaugh before reading a Lifetime movie script about him. “I’m not exactly up on the click stuff that comes out,” adds the actor, presumably referencing clickbait. 

On a Zoom call, Pullman has the aw-shucks charm of your kooky, technologically challenged uncle. GQ has likened him to “a kindly high school history teacher, slightly overwhelmed by the modern world,” and that tracks too. On our Zoom, Pullman starts talking while muted and realizes that the picture frame he tore from the wall of his Beachwood Canyon home seconds before starting this call—“thought I’d better have a clear background”—is still visible on the bed he threw it on.

When he isn’t living in Beachwood Canyon, Pullman operates a ranch he co-owns with his brother; it’s near Whitehall, Montana, where the population hovers at just over 1,000. Pullman didn’t realize how out of the loop he was on the true-crime front until he went to his local farm supply store and the guys working there knew all about Murdaugh too. 

Had Pullman been glued to the news and trial coverage, the idea of playing the disgraced lawyer could have felt like a bit too much. But the actor was intrigued by the idea of playing someone so “exposed.” Even in today’s world, with its social media confessionals and supposed transparency, “you’re not getting the whole truth” with any person, he says. “When someone’s saying, ‘This is the absolute most terrible time in my life,’ there’s some aspects of it they still will not share,” Pullman points out. 

So there was something alluring to him about playing a compulsive liar who had woven so many webs of secrets that he’d become a stranger to his own family members—and then had the webs wiped clean in a courtroom reckoning.

He also kind of appreciated that people seemed to be thrown by his casting once he started talking about it: “They would be like, ‘Oh, you’re playing that guy?’ There was something that felt like, this is a challenge,” says Pullman. “Sometimes you just know actors so well, you don’t need to see the movie because you know what the performance is going to be.” But there is definitely something unexpected about Pullman—he who united mankind in Independence Day, got the girl in While You Were Sleeping, and was pantsed by ghosts in the PG movie Casper—playing a man found guilty of murdering his family members.

This story gets stranger, though. Once Pullman agreed to play the part, the actor only had about 10 days to familiarize himself with Murdaugh’s sprawling crime saga, including the 911 call, dashcam footage, and courtroom testimony. Because of the looming SAG-AFTRA strike, the Lifetime production had to wrap Pullman’s scenes ASAP. 

Pullman dyed his hair the correct synthetic butterscotch and pored over the tapes of Murdaugh, delighting in the fact that the script’s dialogue hewed so closely to the actual transcripts. The first time we see him in the Lifetime movie, he is fully committed to Murdaugh, wearing the now infamous white T-shirt and pacing frantically. His voice seesaws in that familiar Lowcountry dialect while delivering the 911 call dialogue.

“I need police and an ambulance immediately,” Pullman says, recreating the now infamous call Murdaugh placed on June 7, 2021. “I’ve been up to it now, it’s bad.”

Pullman makes a meal out of Murdaugh’s Lowcountry-isms (Paul becomes “Paw-Paw,” etc.) and behavioral peculiarities, like the slight limp Murdaugh walked with. “It changed when he lost weight,” Pullman says. “He lost probably 60 pounds or so” in the lead-up to the trial, according to the actor.  When Pullman viewed the trial footage, he noticed that Murdaugh had an entirely different physicality when he took the witness stand. “There’s that one angle that sees him from behind, going toward the chair, and he’s limber—almost like an athlete going up to take a penalty shot.”

While studying body camera footage from the night of Maggie and Paul’s murders, Pullman was fascinated by the way Murdaugh shifted from frantic and traumatized (“I’m all caught up in this thing that’s gripping me,” he says, putting on the urgent affect heard during Murdaugh’s 911 call) to casual, collected, and almost helpful with police (“Oh, no, that was over there,” he says while in calm-Murdaugh mode).

Pullman is from rural New York and spends a lot of time in desolate Montana. “In rural areas, there’s a little bit more humility, and sometimes it’s demonstrative humility that is kind of like a put-on thing. Sometimes it’s genuine, but [you’re] much more likely to see somebody with affectations in those areas,” says Pullman. “I love the South for that.”

There’s one detail that Pullman wishes he’d had time to work into his performance: the way Murdaugh, on the evening of the murders, kept interrupting dramatic questioning by police officers to open a car door and spit chew. “In Montana, we call it snus—fine-cut tobacco you put behind your lip,” Pullman tells me. “[Murdaugh] was very discreet about it, but in one of the dashcam recordings, when he’s sitting in the passenger seat up front, a couple times he opened the door, leaned out, and then came back in…. I realized that he was dipping.” 

Pullman loves this kind of behavioral anomaly. “Having that buildup of spit and then [making] the decision, in the middle of being traumatized and everything, [to lean out and spit]—that would’ve been great.”

Most humans are saddled with emotions like guilt and anxiety, but to play Murdaugh, Pullman turned off valves for those feelings. “Hearing things and not letting them cause anxiety, it’s kind of freeing,” says Pullman, explaining that it seemed like Murdaugh’s cycles of addiction and lying were interlinked. “When you are feeling like that monster of doom and gloom is starting to sneak toward you…to be relieved from that and to [have] an invincible power of talk where you do the high-wire act and whatever you need to say is going to occur to you in the moment because you’re so on top of it—that thing about an addiction is kind of wonderful.”

Speaking about how Murdaugh escalated his drug use to make up for his increased tolerance, Pullman explains, “You are trying to stay on top of a moving wave. You’re just willing to do whatever it takes to stay on top of it.”

Some people might scoff at an actor like Pullman doing a Lifetime movie. After all, he’s done a David Mamet play on Broadway (Oleanna); been directed by David Lynch (Lost Highway); been nominated for a SAG Award by his peers (The Sinner); costarred in a Tony-winning play (The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?); and delivered a presidential speech onscreen that some might argue is better than ones given by real-life presidents.

But Pullman seems thrilled to have been on a film set where “people are excited about what you’re doing.” Making the Lifetime movie, especially after the isolation of COVID, was a nice reset, he explains. “There was a great young crew…. They weren’t jaded at all.”

Despite his extensive filmography, Pullman doesn’t have any airs about him. In fact, when the actors strike took effect, he literally pulled up his sleeves and got to work on the ranch.

“You know what a jackleg fence is?” he asks—an exceedingly polite query considering I clearly don’t know what a jackleg fence is. “It’s a little more expensive than barbed wire, but you use it in places where there’s a lot of push. I have a bull pasture where the bulls get in there, and then in springtime particularly, they pushed that fence. So I went up and made the jackleg fence for it, which took a week. And some it was during rain.” 

But Pullman enjoyed it: “It is so good to have a full day of honest physical work to do.”